The People

Professor Clark Lawlor (Director)

Clark Lawlor is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Northumbria University. His publications include Sciences of Body and Mind (ed.), Vol. 2 of Literature and Science 1660-1834 [anthology], Gen. Ed. Judith Hawley, 8 vols (2003), Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (2006) and From Melancholia to Prozac: a History of Depression (2012). Between 2006 and 2009 he was Co-Director of the Leverhulme Trust project 'Before Depression, 1660-1800: The Representation and Culture of the English Malady', and was Principal Investigator of ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832’ (2013-2016), a major project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Some of his publications arising from this project include Clark Lawlor and Jonathan Andrews, Editors and Intro., Special Edition of the Journal of Literature and Medicine, '"An Exclusive Privilege … to Complain": Framing Fashionable Diseases in the Long Eighteenth Century.' 35 (2) (2017), pp. 239-269, with his essay '"The History of Half the Sex": Fashionable Disease, Capitalism, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century.' Literature and Medicine, 35 (2) (2017), pp. 355-386. This article is now Open Access . Clark Lawlor and Anita O'Connell, Editors and Intro, Special Edition ‘Fashioning Illness in the Long Eighteenth Century’. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40 (4) (2017), pp. 491-501, including his essay ‘Laurence Sterne, Fame and Fashionable Disease’. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40 (4) (2017), pp. 519-535. He recently enjoyed co-authoring an article with Allan Ingram: ‘The gloom of anxiety’: fear in the long eighteenth century’, in Dreadful Passions: Fear in the Literary and Medical Imagination, Medieval to Modern, ed. by Daniel McCann and ‎Claire McKechnie-Mason (Palgrave, 2018), pp. 55-78.

Emeritus Professor Allan Ingram (Co-Director)

Allan Ingram is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle. He has published books on James Boswell, on Swift and Pope, and on eighteenth-century insanity and its representation, as well as edited collections of primary material on the relations between insanity and medicine in the period. He has also published on Joseph Conrad and on D.H. Lawrence. He edited Gulliver’s Travels for Broadview Press (2012). Between 2006 and 2009 he was Director of the Leverhulme Trust research project, ‘Before Depression, 1660-1800’, as part of which he was co-general editor of a Pickering & Chatto four-volume collection, Depression and Melancholy, 1660-1800 (2012) and co-author of Melancholy Experience in the Long Eighteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He was Co-Director of a second Leverhulme Trust research project, ‘Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, 1660-1830’ and co-edited a volume of essays, Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fashioning the Unfashionable (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He co-edited a memorial volume for Bill Overton, Voice and Context in Eighteenth-Century Verse: Order in Variety (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and is co-editor of a recent collection of essays, Writing and Constructing the Self in Great Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2018). He is one of the editors of the English Association journal, English. His current work, which is connected with this project, is on relations between Swift, Pope and the medical profession.

Dr Leigh Wetherall-Dickson (Co-Director)

Leigh Wetherall Dickson is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century literature at Northumbria University. She has participated in two major research projects, both funded by the Leverhulme Trust: 'Before Depression 1660-1800' (www.beforedepression.com) and 'Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, 1660-1832' (www.fashionablediseases.info). Her current research interest is the overlap between fame, fashion and illness in the Regency period, and she is completing a monograph on that subject, scrutinising the overlap in relation to debates about aristocratic reform. She is also interested in mourning culture, sites of memorialisation and posthumous fame.

Dr Helen Williams (Co-Director)

Dr Helen Williams is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Northumbria University. She specialises in book history and has published widely on the work of Laurence Sterne and John Cleland, the latter in relation to illness and disability in the context of eighteenth-century representations of sex and sexuality. In 2013 she worked with the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall on a major Heritage-Lottery funded project exploring the Good Humour Club of York, alias the Doctors Club. The project provided outreach opportunities around medical coteries and cultures of writing in eighteenth-century gentleman’s clubs. She is PI of an AHRC-funded project in collaboration with Cambridge University Library, Sterne Digital Library.

Dr Ashleigh Blackwood (Postdoctoral Research Associate)

Dr Ashleigh Blackwood is Postdoctoral Research Assistant for the project at Northumbria University. Her work focuses on medical development of the long eighteenth century, specifically how medical discourse and development was created by all levels of society through writing. She has specialist interests in the areas of reproductive and childbirth medicine, women’s involvement in medicine, as well as interactions between literature and human health, and has published on a variety of authors including poet Jane Cave Winscom, novelist Laurence Sterne and midwife-author Martha Mears. Ashleigh is also interested in print culture and the involvement of women in writing, publishing and bookselling during the eighteenth century, as well as the proliferation of medical print in the long eighteenth century. She has collaborated with various third sector organisations involved in education and heritage including the Royal Society of Medicine, Fairfax House and Shandy Hall to bring medical humanities to the public. Outputs with these collaborating organisations have included exhibitions (‘The Good Humour Club, Shandy Hall and ‘Shandy’s Physicians’, RSM), heritage and museum training and public lectures.

Laurence Sullivan (PhD Student)

The Ph.D student for this project, Laurence Sullivan graduated with first class honours in Drama and Theatre Studies from the University of Kent, before completing his Master’s degree in Shakespeare and Theatre at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, where he was awarded a distinction. His research interests concerning the 18th century include: the creation, proliferation, dissemination and reception of commercial self-help books, portrayals of domestic medicine – both in the form of its practitioners and examples of its use – on the stage and page, and the contemporary dialogue surrounding the sale and use of so-called ‘quack’ remedies in the domestic sphere. Before embarking on his Ph.D, he taught Drama at Taunton School and the Royal Ballet School, White Lodge; as well as completing research projects for the National Trust on objects found at both Dyffyrn Gardens, Vale of Glamorgan and Croome Court, Worcestershire. He hopes to bring an element of creativity to his research via his background in creative writing, with his fiction and haiku having appeared in over forty publications such as Londonist, The List, and broadcast by the Japanese television network NHK. More information can be found at website: www.laurencesullivan.co.uk